Simon Kernick - Deadline

The use of her name made Tina feel naked and exposed. 'No, it doesn't,' she answered, beginning to turn away.

'If you don't come now, we might have to come and find you, Tina Boyd.' His voice had hardened now, laced with threat.

She turned back. 'What does your friend want?'

'He just wants to talk.' He shrugged his powerful shoulders. 'That's it. Nothing more. I think he might have some information for you.'

He leaned behind him and opened the back door of the Mercedes for her.

Tina made a quick calculation. If they knew her name, they knew she was a SOCA agent. That meant it was unlikely they were going to risk hurting her. Especially when their car, and possibly even their faces, would already have been picked up somewhere on CCTV. And when it came down to it, there was no reason for them to hurt her anyway. She didn't owe Daroyce money, had in fact never met him, which meant the guy in front of her was almost certainly telling the truth.

Those were the pros. There was only one con, but it was a big one. What if she was wrong?

It was a big decision, but in the end – although she'd never admit it to herself – part of the reason Tina Boyd attracted trouble was that she was always prepared to put herself in situations where encountering it was inevitable. And this was one of them. Taking a long look round so that the people walking up and down the street might remember her face if it came to it, she got inside the Merc and shut the door.

'Let's go then,' she said, lighting a cigarette.

They drove through back streets heading west in the direction of Queensbury. Tina tried to make conversation, knowing how important it was to create a rapport with the black guy, who was clearly the senior of the two. But now she was in the car, both men were worryingly reticent. The white guy said nothing at all, his friend either answering her questions with an uninterested yes and no or ignoring them altogether.

The journey didn't last long, ten minutes at most, before they pulled into a dingy dead-end road lined with brand-new low-rise council flats on one side and a pair of grim-looking tower blocks on the other. The car pulled into a parking space in front of the first of the blocks, next to an overflowing bright orange wheelie bin that seemed to be attracting the flies. A gang of half a dozen kids on mountain bikes were messing about by a rusty climbing frame over to one side.

'Nice place,' said Tina, wrinkling her nose against the smell from the bin as she got out of the car.

'Mr Daroyce likes to stay close to his roots,' answered the black guy as they walked over to the front entrance.

Tina noticed the kids give him respectful looks as he passed, before passing more hostile eyes over her. Jesus, she thought. What is it about me? I might as well be wearing a flashing blue light on my head.

They went up to the tenth floor in a graffiti strewn lift with black smoke stains running down two sides as if someone had tried to set it alight, travelling in silence with only the creaking of the cables for company. Tina was getting more and more nervous. She didn't much like going alone to isolated places with the kind of men your mother warned you about, particularly when she was unarmed and out of contact with her colleagues. She thought about trying to leave but had a strong feeling that they wouldn't let her.

As they emerged from the lift into a dingy corridor only partly illuminated by noisy overhead strip lighting, dark shadows flickering at the edges, she was reminded of something that had happened during her backpacking days. She'd been caught in a sudden storm while travelling by fishing boat between islands in southern Indonesia. Huge dark waves had reared up and crashed over the deck, sending the tiny boat spinning and lurching. The fishermen had looked terrified, their expressions terrifying Tina even more as she clung desperately to her seat, genuinely believing she was going to die. Then the friend she was travelling with leaned over and, with a grim smile on his face, had shouted above the noise, 'It's not much consolation now, but you're going to love telling this story one day!' And she had, too. They'd made it across, the storm had passed, and life had moved on. The moral being, things are never as bad as they seem.

She told herself she'd be out of there soon enough, life would move on, and she'd have a good laugh about it over a long gin and tonic, curled up on her sofa.

The flat they wanted was at the end of the corridor. She knew which one it was going to be straight away, because it looked like Fort Knox. The doorway was covered with an iron security grille, the door behind it reinforced with a series of home-cut steel plates. No fewer than five separate locks ran up one side, and attached to the doorframe was a tiny CCTV camera, its lens pointing out at head height through one of the gaps in the grille.

The black guy produced a set of keys and let them in, a process that took the best part of a minute. The interior was cloyingly warm and smelled of dope as they made their way through a narrow hallway and into a dimly lit backroom which was furnished with just a table and two chairs facing each other on either side.

Sitting in one of the chairs, with his legs crossed and his back to them, was a short, well-built black man in a peach-coloured suit and fedora of the same colour. The fedora was set at a jaunty angle and had two small peacock feathers jutting from the rim, giving the man the overall appearance of a 1970s New York pimp. He didn't turn round as the black guy moved out of the way and Tina stepped inside, just motioned with a casual wave of a hand for her to take the vacant seat.

'I hear you been asking questions about Patrick Phelan,' said the man from beneath the fedora as she sat down opposite him. 'You a cop, yeah?'

His voice was softer than she'd been expecting, the accent local but with just a hint of something more exotic. As he lifted his head she could see that he was young, probably no more than late twenties, with a round boyish face and dark intelligent eyes. He was definitely not what she'd been expecting, and now that the two men who'd brought her here had disappeared into another room, she felt herself relax a little.

'Yes,' she answered, 'I'm a cop.' She wasn't technically, she was an agent, but it was never worth explaining it like that since no one ever seemed to understand the difference. 'I work for the Serious and Organized Crime Agency. You must be Leon Daroyce.'

He touched a finger to his hat and half-smiled. 'That's me.'

'And yes, I have been asking questions about Patrick Phelan,' Tina continued. 'We're looking for him.'

Daroyce nodded slowly. 'So am I,' he said softly, hardly moving his lips as he spoke, so that his words came out almost as a hiss.

He leaned forward in his seat and crossed his hands on the table. They were small and surprisingly dainty considering his build, dwarfed by the gold sovereign rings on most of his fingers. He exhaled slowly through pursed lips and fixed her with a gaze that was almost hypnotic.

'Let me tell you something, Miss Boyd,' he hissed. 'I'm an entrepreneur, a small businessman. I lend money like a bank, except unlike a bank I don't ask hundreds of questions. I don't make my customers fill out a pile of forms. You know what someone once said? A banker's a man who lends you his umbrella when the sun's shining, then asks for it back as soon as it starts raining.'

'Mark Twain.'

He shrugged, uninterested. 'Well, I'm not like that. I don't turn people away. All I ask is you pay me back the money you've borrowed, and the interest on it. That's it. I'm providing a service. And I provided a service to Pat Phelan. Except he seems to have welshed on the deal. He owes me thirty-five thousand pounds, Miss Boyd. And I need to get that money back.'